English Police Mysteries

The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man - facing charges of willful murder, sexual assault and rape. But as the obvious leads fade into twilight and darkness, Morse becomes more and more convinced that passion holds the key....

The village of Badger's Drift is the essence of tranquillity. But when resident and well-loved spinster Miss Simpson takes a stroll in the nearby woods, she stumbles across something she was never meant to see, and there's only one way to keep her quiet. Miss Simpson's death is not suspicious, say the villagers. But Miss Lucy Bellringer refuses to rest: her friend has been murdered. She is sure of it.

The windswept shores of Norfolk may look peaceful, but dark secrets fester beneath the surface. As the seasons turn, so too does the tide of crime, and DI Tom Janssen must face new and chilling investigations. From a grim discovery at the foot of Sheringham Cliffs to the death of an army veteran, each mystery draws Tom and his team deeper into a tangled web of lies, betrayal, and long-buried truths.

The Dollmaker was the name of the serial killer who had stalked Los Angeles ruthlessly, leaving grisly calling cards on the faces of his victims. Now, with a single faultless shot, Harry Bosch thinks he has ended the city's nightmare.

Bo Tully, sheriff of Blight County, Idaho, has dealt with small-town crime throughout his long, storied career. Now, contemplating retirement after years on the job, Tully is faced with perhaps his most perplexing case yet. When area bald eagles start getting picked off by a ghost-like killer, and when a prominent local rancher is murdered by an arrow with eagle fletching, things gets complicated fast. In this fast-paced whodunit, Tully has a vast array of suspects to choose from, including the rancher's gorgeous, bird-loving wife, who mysteriously leaves for a ranch in Mexico the day of the murder.

Paterson, New Jersey, 1979: Jamie Palmieri is an up-and-coming patrol officer, three years out of the academy and frustrated with his slow rise to detective. That all changes one frigid night in January, when a double homicide at a local bar leaves the owner and a young woman dead.

When a freak accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a "ghost", with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What's worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk - and it has recently been fired. The next day Stride learns that a Duluth college student has vanished and worries that the two incidents are related. But what would have put an ordinary young woman in the crosshairs of a man who has all the hallmarks of an assassin for hire?

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Sean Hudson thought nothing of hopping a fence to dig illegally for Native American arrowheads, spear points, and other artifacts. Did his thieving, trespassing ways get him killed? How else to explain the small pickaxe that was found sunk deep into his skull? Blanco County game warden John Marlin has dealt with these kinds of looters before, so it's no surprise when the sheriff asks him to assist with the investigation. Marlin quickly learns that this case - like the soil at a dig site - has many layers.

Bruno Courrèges - provincial French police chief extraordinaire - is back in another delectable tale of mystery and suspense that unfolds in the gastronomically ravishing Dordogne.

Three Chicago women have been found strangled, embalmed, and posed as if still alive. Doubting the findings of the local PD’s profiler, the FBI calls on forensic psychologist Zoe Bentley to investigate. Zoe quickly gets off on the wrong foot with her new partner, Special Agent Tatum Gray. Zoe’s a hunter, intense and focused; Tatum’s a smug maverick with little respect for the rules.

The second book in the Misty Isle series, by J M Dalgliesh.

Detective Lauren Pengelly has only been part of the Penzance police force for less than two years, but that’s enough time to know that the sleepy Cornish town doesn’t see many murders. So, when the bones of a woman with a hole in her skull are discovered behind a derelict cottage, she immediately assumes the worst. Rallying her team, Lauren is flooded with a strange sense of relief when the bones turn out to be almost twenty years old, not a recent victim. But it quickly turns to dread when she receives her second heart-stopping call of the day–a little girl, Isla, has been kidnapped.

Detectives Coleen Clayton and Lester Pruitt are searching for a missing person when they turn up a dead body. Fitting into a pattern of gruesome homicides hitting South Carolina, the case bears an unnerving resemblance to one from 30 years ago—one that still haunts Exeter. The killer has become a legend, spawning countless ghost stories and Halloween costumes. A killer named Crouchback. But Crouchback died in prison 30 years ago, right?

It’s a slow August morning in King’s Cove. Lane has a book to read and a lawn that needs mowing. At the Nelson Police Station her husband, Inspector Darling, and his team are tidying their desks during a rare lull. Then Lane receives a call with news that Darling’s brother Bob has gone missing from a mining camp in Mexico and the police station is visited by the frantic mother of a boy kidnapped from his bedroom.

After the body of a brutally murdered young woman is recovered from the Gulf of Mexico far from shore, FBI Special Agent Tess Winnett is called in to assist with the profiling of the murderer. Although only one body has been found, every detail about the gruesome crime points to the work of a serial killer. Have there been others left to die far at sea, where no one will ever find them? Is there a connection to be found, or is Tess searching for evidence that doesn’t exist?

Shortly after 9.30 in the morning, a young man walks into Surf City, Bondi’s newest shopping complex. He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie - and a bomb around his neck. Just a few minutes later, he is locked in a shop on the upper floor. And trapped with him are four innocent bystanders. For police chaplain Paul Doherty, called to the scene by Senior Sergeant Boehm, it’s a story that will end as tragically as it began. For this is clearly no ordinary siege. The boy, known as Ali Khan, seems as frightened as his hostages and has yet to utter a single word.

Sergeant Hamish Macbeth is worried about how the folks will react to his new assistant officer; the enigmatic American James Bland, whose true mission is to track down the members of a Russian spy network. In the meantime, he and Bland deal with it the usual crop of traffic incidents, lost wallets, lost dogs, and lost people, but a spate of burglaries committed by a man dubbed “Spiderman” give Hamish cause for serious concern.

Lord Comstock is a barbarous newspaper tycoon with enemies in high places. His murder in the study of his country house poses a dilemma for the Home Secretary. In the hours before his death, Lord Comstock’s visitors included the government Chief Whip, an Archbishop, and the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland Yard. Suspicion falls upon them all and threatens the impartiality of any police investigation. Abandoning protocol, the Home Secretary invites four famous detectives to solve the case: Mrs Adela Bradley, Sir John Saumarez, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Mr Roger Sheringham.

It has been almost a decade since Duluth said good-bye to its innocence. The city creeps ever closer to the 10th anniversary of the year in which it found itself both gripped by murder and united in terror and during which the pillar of its community, DS Jonathan Stride, had his home and heart torn to ribbons by the claws of cancer. Cat Mateo, an orphan with a knack for landing on her feet, has bid farewell to a life on the streets. This once-stray teenager owes her rescue to Detective Stride, the father figure she holds close to her heart.